The Language of Flowers genre is at the intersection of botany, horticulture, natural history, art, poetry, and women’s studies. This popular literary trend in the 19th century presented the world of botany through dictionaries of flowers and associated meanings, floral poetry, and prose, offering a sentimental view of natural history. A properly arranged bouquet was said to convey a “secret message” for the recipient. The “social media” of its day, this Victorian fad led to many editions of works published, with multiple titles by successful authors.

Frances Sargent Osgood edited two works in this genre: Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of Poetry and The Floral Offering.

Her description of floriography from her introductory poem in the Floral Offering follows:

INTRODUCTORY.

THY EMBLEM FLOWER.

Round every flower there gleams a glory

Bequeathed by antique song or story;

To each, old legends give a name

And its peculiar charm proclaims;

O’er smiling lawn – through shaded grove,

Our dreaming poets pensive rove,

And strive to read their language rare,

And learn the lesson latent there-

Then ‘mid them all, so fair to see,

What flower shall thy fit emblem be?

The Floral Offering, a Token of Friendship was edited by Frances S. Osgood and illustrated by J. Ackerman “with ten beautiful bouquets of flowers, elegantly colored after nature.” The work was published in Philadelphia, PA by Carey and Hart publishers in 1847. It contains poems by Osgood and others, plates with flowers assembled in bouquets, and a floral dictionary at the back containing her definitions of flowers. For example, basil means “I hate you” and olive means “peace be with you.” Osgood uses these definitions to ascribe secret messages. The list of illustrations for the plates provides the “secret message” that each illustrated arrangement is meant to convey.

Frances Sargent Osgood (1811 – 1850) was one of the most influential American women poets of her time. She was born in Boston to a family of poets together with her brother, sister, and step-sister. Early on, her parents recognized her talent and encouraged her pursuits. Her first poem was published when she was a young teenager. She was a prolific writer and published numerous works in magazines for women and children and also authored and edited several books.

Osgood married a painter, Samuel Stillman Osgood, in 1835. He had previously studied at the Royal Academy, and they moved back to London where he had a successful career painting portraits. During the four years that they lived abroad, Osgood remained active in her craft and in 1839 published a compilation of all her work in a volume entitled Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England. With the unexpected death of her father, the Osgoods returned to the States, first to her family home in Boston and then settling in New York in 1840. While in New York, Osgood published two volumes in the language of flowers genre in 1841 and 1847.

Osgood was very well known during her life-time, such that her biography appears in The American Female Poets; with Biographical and Critical Notices (1848), by Caroline May, and in The Female Poets of America (1849), edited by Rufus Griswold. Her notoriety and embracement of the language of flowers genre may have influenced and encouraged other women to write in the field of horticulture, botany, and natural history.

An interesting side note to her time in New York is Osgood’s association with Edgar Allen Poe. He published her poems and thought highly of her work. Their friendship is rumored to have developed into a love affair.

Frances Sargent Osgood died from tuberculosis in 1850 at 38 years old. She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston with her daughter that preceded her in death. Her other two daughters died just after her in 1851.

The Memorial (1851) by “Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood” and edited by Mary E. Hewitt was a tribute to her life. Its 346 pages contain numerous pieces by different authors; it is truly an acknowledgement of her importance to her family, friends, and literary colleagues.

The Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden is digitizing 62 rare and unique language of flowers volumes published in the 19^th century as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded to the Chicago Horticultural Society. Over three-years, the volumes are being conserved and digitized by expert staff at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The Floral Offering is from the second set of volumes. You can explore volumes from sets one and two as well as other titles in the Language of Flowers collection in BHL. Learn more about other language of flowers volumes digitized as part of this grant in this past blog post.

References

Griswold, Rufus W. The Female Poets of America. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849. Internet resource.

Hewitt, Mary E. M, and Frances S. Osgood. The Memorial. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1851. Internet resource.

May, Caroline. The American Female Poets: With Biographical and Critical Notices. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1848. Internet resource.

John Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca (1806-1840) has been described as “the most costly and beautiful book devoted to any flora” [1]. Dedicated to the plants of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, only 30 subscriptions for the first edition were sold and of those, only 25 were completed. While each copy was sold for £254, the cost to produce each copy was about £620 [2, 176].

Flora Graeca arose out of botanical expeditions carried out by English botanist John Sibthorp in Greece and Asia Minor between 1786-87 and 1794-1795. Sibthorp employed Austrian artist Ferdinand Lukas Bauer to accompany him on the first expedition and serve as illustrator. During the expedition, Bauer created around one thousand plant sketches, using a color coding process to record the exact colors of the specimens he observed in the field, allowing him to produce accurate final drawings based on his field sketches [3].

Unfortunately, Sibthrop contracted tuberculosis during the return from his second expedition. He died on 8 February 1796 in Bath, before the work could be completed. His will, however, provided an endowment to ensure the completion of the publication [4].

Sibthorp’s friend and fellow botanist, James Edward Smith, and Sibthorp’s brother-in-law, John Hawkins, oversaw the publication of the first six volumes between 1806-1828. Volume seven was published in 1830, and volumes eight through ten were edited by John Lindley and published between 1833-40. The first nine volumes included 100 plates each, with the final volume consisting of 66 plates [5]. The hand-colored plates were engraved on copper by Bauer, James Sowerby and James de Carle Sowerby after Bauer’s drawings [2, 175].

The Lloyd Library and Museum is fortunate to own one of the 25 complete copies of the first edition of this title. This copy was digitized by the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County as part of the BHL Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project (funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services) and is freely available for all to enjoy in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. A volume from this title is also currently on display at the Lloyd Library & Museum as part of the current exhibit Treasures of the Lloyd, which is open until 21 February 2020.

References

[1] Stearn, W. T. (1960). “Franz and Ferdinand Bauer, masters of botanical illustration”. Endeavour 19(73).
[2] Stearn, W. (1967). Sibthorp, Smith, the ‘Flora Graeca’ and the ‘Florae Graecae Prodromus’. Taxon, 16(3), 168-178. doi:10.2307/1216982
[3] Walsh, H. (2003). “Ferdinand Lukas Bauer”. Rare Books from the MBG Library. 23 October. Accessed on 4 February 2020. http://www.illustratedgarden.org/mobot/rarebooks/author.asp?creator=Bauer, Ferdinand Lukas&creatorID=96.
[4] Christie’s. (1997). “Flora Graeca”. Lot 138, sale 8690. Accessed on 4 February 2020. https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/sibthorp-john-james-edward-smith-and-john-228372-details.aspx.
[5] Europeana. (2020). “Flora Graeca”. Accessed on 4 February 2020. https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/92002/BibliographicResource_1000093325414_source.html.

As we celebrate the role women have played in the natural history sciences, we can find many examples of successful women who have been under-appreciated for the meaningful work they did during their lives. Women like Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Margaret Smith, and Evelyn Cheesman significantly advanced a variety of sciences, even if they have only recently been gaining attention for doing so. But historic relegation of women has also meant that countless people throughout history were denied the tools to achieve success in these fields. How many women could have been published artists or scientists, if it weren’t for societal expectations that never gave them the chance?

Within the collections of rare botanical texts and seldom seen manuscripts housed at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation is a beautiful work by a largely unknown artist, Dorothea Eliza Smith. Her Fruits of the Lima Market – a collection of watercolors that she completed between 1850 and 1853 – stands out as an exemplary creation made even more impressive by her relative obscurity and the sparse details of her life.

Dorothea was born to Joseph and Dorothy Peers on January 29, 1804, in Wales – the third child and first girl born to the couple. In 1828, when she was twenty-four, she married William Kerr who was a merchant trading primarily out of Caracas, Venezuela, but their marriage was cut short as Kerr seems to have died sometime before 1840. That year, Dorothea married Dr. Archibald Smith, who also had extensive experience living and working in South America.

Smith was born in 1797 in Scotland, received his medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1820, and moved to Peru five years later. Once there, he was employed by a British mining company to help its workers adjust to the high altitudes at which they worked, but the company’s bankruptcy in 1827 meant that Smith needed to find new work. To this effect, he rented some land and began to grow sugar cane, but by 1830 he had moved to Lima and the next year took a job overseeing the health of British and American sailors stationed in and around the Peruvian capital. (Peru became an independent country in 1824, so the sailors were not part of an occupying force.) At some point during this time he must have become acquainted with Dorothea as they married in Scotland in 1840 where they continued to live for the next few years.

While their marriage appears to have been strong, they both faced an enormous loss when Archibald and the couple’s daughter Dorothy – who was eight – were shipwrecked off the Peruvian coast, and Dorothy drowned. Dorothea wrote from Liverpool to her husband shortly after the loss in 1849 that “we are all improving in strength not withstanding our recent trial” and would soon join her husband in Peru with their other children – Sophia, Isabella, and John. Interestingly, Dorothea and the children decided to sail around Cape Horn on their journey to South America rather that land in Panama, walk across the isthmus, and catch another ship to Peru. Both trips took similar amounts of time, but supposedly with three children, Dorothea would have rather not tried to keep track of them on an overland trek. The details of the Smiths’ time in Peru are sparse, other than that Dorothea worked on her watercolors of the fruits of the Lima market from 1850 to 1853, and at any rate they all seemed to have returned to the United Kingdom by 1855. Dorothea would die about nine years later, in 1864, and her husband would join her in 1868, both in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Dorothea Smith’s The Fruits of the Lima Market are significant and worthy of study both for their quality and for their commentary on botanical science and British economic reach. To begin, Dorothea’s watercolors are impressive in that they are thoughtfully detailed in their depiction and with regards to their associated scientific information (Each painting includes notes on its fruit’s scientific name, local name, height, and fruiting months), and in that they have a refined artistic sensibility to them as pertains to the ways in which Smith plays with the juxtaposition of the different colors of the fruits. Smith also provided drawings of cross-sections of the fruits and their seeds. It is further interesting that Smith chose to draw the fruits of the Lima market as opposed to other flora from the Peruvian countryside. Her choice seems to be wrapped up both in her assumedly easy access to such fruits and in her life as spouse to first a merchant then a medical doctor and one-time farmer who both left Britain for opportunities in South America. Even her trip to arrive in Peru followed established trade and tourist routes from Europe to the western South American coast. Her watercolors work on two levels then – the first as an expression of her high scientific and artistic acumen and secondly as a reflection of her proximity to British commercial interests throughout the world. Smith’s manuscript was maintained by her husband after her death as he worked to make it known to knowledgeable scientists (even citing her in his own work), and as such kept it from disappearing into complete obscurity. Thus, the remarkable work of Dorothea Eliza Smith remains and whose story, though very much incomplete, understates the significant contributions of so many unknown female scientists and illustrators to the collected advancement of Western science.

References

Vega, Fernando, Kimberly Fisher, and Tony Willis. “Dorothea Eliza Smith, artist of ‘The Fruits of the Lima Market’” Archives of Natural History 41.2 (October 2014): 223-229.

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43644141.

Walk into most any nursery or florist and you will see beautiful orchids of many colors and sizes, with “easy care” instructions attached right to the pot enabling even the brownest thumb success. Want to shake the winter doldrums? Attend an orchid show or meeting – there are over 500 local groups affiliated with the American Orchid Society alone. Orchids are as diverse as they are beautiful, with over 27,000 accepted species living in nearly every corner of the globe.

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43644221.

We are not alone in our fascination with orchids. In the nineteenth century, Europe was gripped by what has been named “Orchidelirium.”  The collection of orchids from around the world was booming as the industrial revolution continued to change the economy and reach of Europe. Amateur and professional botanists were frantically developing methods to cultivate these exotic plants under glass.

Capitalizing on the orchid trend, a Belgian botanist named Émile de Puydt published a treatise on orchids in French in 1880, entitled Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe [Orchids, iconographic history, organography, classification, geography, collections, trade, employment, culture, with a descriptive review of the species cultivated in Europe (tr.)].

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43643931.

Les orchidées was published on the tails of another French orchid book directed towards amateurs, entitled L’Orchidophile: traité théorique et pratique sur la culture des Orchidées [The Orchid, theoretical and practical treatise on growing orchids (tr.)] by François du Buysson. Both works contained detailed information regarding orchid culture. However, L’Orchidophile is a hefty book of over 500 pages, with dense text, equipment line drawings, and tables but not a single drawing of these magnificent plants. It appealed to the serious orchid cultivator, but lacked a “wow” factor to make it appeal to a more general French-speaking audience.

De Puydt’s book changed that. The more scholarly sections of Les orchidées are less than half the length of those in L’Orchidophile, yet they are filled with 237 black and white drawings of orchids, exotic locales, and greenhouses bursting with plants. The final section of Les orchidées contains fifty full-page chromolithographs (by M. Leroy and M. Guibert, of whom little is known) of cultured orchids accompanied by elegant descriptions of each species. De Puydt put his writing talents to great use, describing the orchid species as “beautiful (belle),” “magnificent (magnifique),” “pretty (jolie),” and “very splendid (plus slendide).” The book received awards from the Société d’Acclimatation de Paris and the Société centrale d’Horticulture de Paris.

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43644233.

Following de Puydt’s book, another Belgian botanist specializing in orchids, Jean Jules Linden, began publication of Lindenia: iconograhie des orchidées in 1885. With lavish illustrations and short 1-2 page hints to growers, the work was quickly translated into English and published to reach an even more general audience of orchid-lovers. Linden highlighted orchids available through his business L’Horticulture Internationale as well as commonly cultivated species and new discoveries.

A modern review of Les orchidées, published in 1973, notes that the descriptions of the orchids in this work lack sufficient scientific and cultural details to be a good resource for modern growers. The review author also criticized the limitations of the drawings and considers the value of the book to be primarily for book collectors. While Les orchidées may not be as detailed as L’Orchidophile or as colorful as Lindenia, it is a well written and beautiful historical overview during the time of “Orchidelirium.”

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43644277.

Paul Émile de Puydt (1810-1891) was born and died in Mons, a small city in western Belgium where his father served for four years as governor of Hainaut province. De Puydt founded the horticulture society of Mons and published many articles in scientific journals and newspapers on horticulture.

De Puydt did not confine his interests to botany. He was a writer, novelist, playwright, and political theorist. He coined the term “panarchy” or competitive government, where people choose the government in which they want to be a citizen. Different forms of government compete for citizens in an open market and more than one form of government can exist in the same locale. In modern times, the term panarchy also refers to a conceptual framework to understand stability and change of complex systems.

Puydt, Émile de. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. 1880. Digitized by Harvard University Botany Libraries. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43644309.

Resources

• De Puydt, Émile. Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.77404
• du Buysson, François. L’Orchidophile: traité théorique et pratique sur la culture des Orchidées. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.15493
• Linden, Jean Jules. Lindenia: iconograhie des orchidées. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.64391

Bibliography

• American Orchid Society. http://www.aos.org/about-us/affiliated-societies.aspx. Accessed 1/11/2017.
• Comte de Kerchove de Denterghem (1891). “P.E. de Puydt.” Revue d’lhorticultre belge et etrangere. Vol. 17, 147-151.
•  De Puydt, Paul Emile. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_%C3%89mile_de_Puydt. Accessed 1/11/2017.
• Duveen, Denis I. (1973). “Les Orchidees: Histoire Iconographique by E. de Puydt.” Bulletin of the American Orchid Society. Vol. 42, No. 7, pgs. 627-629.
• Linden, Lucien (1881). “Paul Émile de Puydt.” L’Illustration horticole. v. 28, pg. 105-107.
• Orchidaceae. Encyclopedia of Life. http://www.eol.org/pages/8156/overview. Accessed 1/11/2017.
• Sustainable Scale Project. http://www.sustainablescale.org/ConceptualFramework/UnderstandingScale/MeasuringScale/Panarchy.aspx. Accessed 1/11/2017.
• Zhou, Li (2015). “Orchidelirium, an Obsession with Orchids, Has Lasted for Centuries.” Smithsonian Magazine. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/orchidelirium-obsession-orchids-lasted-centuries-180954060/#kro3ZxCy1rSpeL5J.99. Accessed 1/13/2017.